Divine Strake was cancelled on February 22,
2007. This site has not been updated
since then. Everything on this
site below not in orange or yellow
background has not been updated since
then. Many of the menu links below are not in working order -
this one is working: about 'life in a nuclear world'. Most of the information in those linked pages was reworked into a new website called nuclearcrimes.org, which later
was shutdown in 2014. Here's a nice letter received from a supporter on the day Divine Strake died:

I just heard the news on NPR this evening. Divine Strake has been cancelled!
You have all done a great service to humanity by your hard work. I hope you all take the time to celebrate and recognize yourselves and each other for the great deed you have done.

Please write about the cancellation and archive the info on your very informative website.

As an activist, I often hear people make excuses for not doing anything, based around the idea that we're "powerless". You success is a great example proving that it's not a matter of whether you have "power" or not, but rather whether you exercise that power or not.

There is no telling how many cases of cancer you have prevented.

Now if we can just get the whole bunker buster nuke program cancelled...

10.
Divine Strake, a 700-ton explosive test,
cannot be transported as a weapon by any
plane or missile. It is a nuclear
simulation - a bunker buster study - that
ignores Congressional intent about no new
nuclear weapons.

9.
Divine Strake will release tons of
carcinogenic gasses including more
than 2 tons of cyanide and
1,500 pounds of phosgene (used as a
chemical weapon in World War I).

8.
Divine
Strake is planned on the lands of the
Western Shoshone Nation granted to them by
the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863. In March 2006, a United
Nations committee urged the United States
government to abort activities that violate
the Nation's sovereignty.

7.
Divine
Strake is arguably in violation of
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty which
banned all testing for nuclear weapons.

6.The
emissions of Divine Strake will be a 'major
source' of air pollution that requires a
Title V (Clean Air Act) permit. No
such permit has been granted and the
government is pretending that the Clean Air
Act doesn't apply to them. The permit
would require holding public hearings, which
the government failed to provide.

5.
Divine Strake sends a signal to the world
that the U.S. is continuing to refine its own
weapons of mass destruction. The
United States' efforts to stem proliferation
overseas would appear false and hypocritical.

4.
Divine Strake is planned at the worse
possible place to conduct a test; the Nevada
Test Site is home to the long-lived
radioactive debris of 100 atmospheric and
825 'underground' (more than 50% leaked)
nuclear tests conducted from 1951-1992.

3.
The government's third Environmental
Assessment (since April 2006) ignores six
1950's atomic tests whose plumes traveled through
Area 16, where Divine Strake is
planned. The fallout from
Coulomb-B (1957) that contained high
concentrations of Plutonium-239 will
get resuspended in the 10,000 foot-high dust
cloud from the blast.

2.
The Environmental Assessment ignores
PM2.5 sized dust (particles that can get
lodged in the lungs). It also
indicates that only 26 soil samples were
taken in a 3 million sq. ft. area of
potential disturbance, and that no soil
samples were taken under and near the actual
Ground-Zero.

1.
Government officials and so-called citizen
'scientists' have been saying that the
radiation from Divine Strake won't go far
and will be no worse than eating a banana or
watching TV. If the government
can get away with a PR campaign to dupe its
own citizens into thinking a dirty bomb is
safe, then we have failed in our 231-year
old experiment called 'democracy.'

'When
people lie about the land, they become
rootless, like tumbleweeds.'

Divine
Strake is the name of a planned, but
postponed, 700-ton chemical explosives
test designed to simulate the blast of a
low-yield nuclear weapon on a hardened
underground bunker. It was
originally planned for detonation at the
Nevada Test Site in June 2006, however a
lawsuit filed by the Western Shoshone
and several downwinders forced a
postponement of the test until
2007. No
date has been set for the test, however
it could happen as early as this spring.

Indigenous
and environmental groups fear that the
test would eject into the atmosphere
radioactive particles that they suspect
were deposited from several 1950s
above-ground nuclear tests (including
Coulomb-B; see graphic above) at the Nevada
Test Site. These long-lived
radioisotopes, including Plutonium-239
and Americium-241, which would
contaminate our air, soil, water and
food supplies if they became airborne,
are likely contaminants in the soils at
the Divine Strake ground-zero. The
radioactive
isotopes in the cloud could be deposited
anywhere in the United States (1).

Divine
Strake is nearly identical to a
conventional explosive test dubbed 'Dice
Throw' that was conducted at the White
Sands Missile Range in New
Mexico in 1976. Dice Throw
'rattled windows in towns located 25-35
miles away and sent a large gray cloud
over the nearby San Andreas Mountains.'

What
does 'Divine Strake' mean?
The Department of Defense employs a
unique convention that determines the
first two letters that must be used when
naming a test or experiment. As
for Divine Strake, the first two
letters, 'DI,' corresponds to the
category of Advanced Concepts Technology
Demonstration that has direct systems
application. DTRA, the Pentagon
agency that is sponsoring Divine Strake,
chose a word that begins with these two
letters [DIVINE] to label all of the
tests in a series of proposed
experiments. To distinguish
individual tests in the series, a
scientist at the agency suggested using
the names of WWII aircraft for the
second words: names in DTRA's test
series include Divine Thunderbolt,
Divine Albatross, and Divine
Viking. Although Strake
doesn't appear to be named after an
actual WWII aircraft, it perhaps was
chosen for the meaning of the word
'Strake', which is a' device for
controlling air flow over an
aircraft.'

A
picture can tell a thousand words.
And what does this picture
tell?

It
tells (we thinks) that the Pentagon has already
readied the blast site for Divine
Strake. Oh yeah! The erosion
control and spill containment trenches
are in place, a 30+ foot pit for the
Divine Strake explosives is collecting
dust, and the wires are probably all
connected. Oh yeah folks, they're
serious about doing this one....

Divine
Strake: a simulation of a nuclear test

Divine
Strake entails the explosion of 700 tons of
slurry mix of ammonium nitrate and fuel
oil. Can
you imagine 700 tons of slurry?700
tons weighs about the same as 54 SCHOOL
BUSSES.

It
is surely too heavy to transport by any
plane.

Or
even a missile.

The only rocket-like
device in the U.S. arsenal that can store 700
tons of liquid explosives is the SPACE SHUTTLE
EXTERNAL TANK, which can carry up to 720 tons
of fuel.

However,
the EXTERNAL TANK isn't a missile.
It's just a big 'tank.' The Department
of Defense would have to (somehow) fly the
Space Shuttle over enemy territory and then
drop the EXTERNAL TANK with the hope that
it will land on a bunker storing WMDs.

Therefore,
one must assume that Divine Strake is meant to
simulate the explosion of a smaller device
capable of a extraordinarily tremendous blast.
The only such device would be a nuclear
weapon. And that is precisely
the
purpose of Divine Strake.

Additional
media/reading:

View
the Guardian's (U.K.) Flash
movie on the historical (leading up to the
present) push for low-yield nuclear
weapon/Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator
development in the U.S. Government

View
this excellent
video (June 2006) on the U.S.'s use of
Depleted Uranium in Iraq and the the likely
casualties from a nuclear strike on Iran,
involving "only" six B61-11
bunker-busting nukes on 2 nuclear sites.
Speaker: Dr. Helen Caldicott.

During
the era of U.S. atomic testing in Nevada
from 1951 to 1992, hundreds of atmospheric
and underground nuclear explosions were conducted at
various regions of the Nevada Test Site
including one valley called 'Yucca Flat.'
Those open-air and numerous leaky underground tests formed clouds of hot radioactive
gasses and debris that were
picked up by the jet stream and deposited as
radioactive fallout across
the United States and abroad.

The
proposed Divine Strake test, which would be
the largest conventional explosive test
conducted in
the U.S. since 1993, is planned in a region
of the
Nevada Test Site (NTS) - one of the world's
largest radioactively contaminated areas - that
officials insist is devoid of radioactively
contaminated soils. Test site
officials have failed to provide any proof
to substantiate this claim. The NTS
is off-limits to civilians
and scientists, so only the Department of
Energy, which oversees the test site, can
provide this proof.

Listen to the comments
of Robert Hager, Esq., on NPR (KNPR-NV)
Radio on May 10, 2006

One official even told a Las Vegas paper in June that the
ground-zero is located in an area
that is "considered to be
somewhat pristine."

Environmental
and indigenous groups disagree with these
claims and in April 2006 filed a lawsuit,
which is still pending, to stop the
test. Opponents of Divine Strake point to
two possible sources of contamination of the ground-zero
for Divine Strake.

1. The
proposed Divine Strake GZ (ground-zero) is eight
miles west of Yucca Flat, where six
particular above-ground tests were associated with fallout
that uniquely traveled in a westward direction,
over the Divine Strake GZ.
Those tests were named Smoky, Turk, Shasta,
Kepler, Galileo and
Coulomb B. Coulomb-B
was a 'safety
test' involving the deliberate dispersal of
Plutonium (Pu-239), which is a radioactive
substance that is perhaps the single greatest
public health concern regarding Divine
Strake.

There
are several reasons to believe that the DOE's
estimate of the public's exposure to Pu-239 from
Divine Strake, which it claims
falls within EPA safe limits for public health,
is very wrong:

Safety
tests, such as Coulomb-B, were designed to
determine how far plutonium would be
scattered in accidents involving a nuclear
bomb. The tests involved the release
of the pure form of plutonium 239, which is
1,000 times more potent than the dust- and
debris-covered form that results from an
atomic blast. Only
ten micrograms (a microscopic amount) of
Plutonium-239, if inhaled, is an amount
'almost certain to induce cancer.'
The safety tests released significantly more Pu239 than
even a typical nuclear test, which splits
(fissions) most of its Pu239 into other
isotopes. Most of the safety tests
were mock-ups of an accident
involving a real nuclear warhead. Only
one safety test, 'Project 57' (Shot Double Tracks) in Area 13,
involved a real warhead that was estimated to have
released about 250 Curies of Pu239 - the
amount a warhead associated with a 1.5 kiloton
yield would
contain. [One Curie of Pu239 is
about 16 grams] A study carried out by
Bechtel Nevada in 1996 estimated that
Project 57 released 60 to 100 Curies
of Plutonium in surface
soils at the Nevada Test Site/Tonopah Test
Range.

Test
site workers expected no yield for Coulomb-B, a
1957 safety test, however its nuclear
material partially underwent a fission reaction with a slight yield
of 300 tons. Coulomb-B's small
nuclear yield was so small that the 'height of burst'
was only 3 feet high. The (plutonium)
material, as with similar safety tests, was
ejected into the air using an all-oralloy gas-boosted system.

Coulomb-B's dust
cloud initially traveled west at 18 mph to Death
Valley, Calif., then broke into two segments,
one at 10,000 ft. and the other at 18,000
ft.; those clouds eventually traveled in an easterly
direction and made it as far east as
several Plains States and Texas. Coulomb-B dumped
a large amount of radiation
directly over Area 16 (and the U16b
complex) however the amount of Curies (of Pu239)
released is unknown; it is
believed that it consisted of several pounds (of
Pu239).

This is what is known:

A 1977
DOE study found that the average plutonium
inventory at 9
safety test sites at the NTS was 11
Curies/site.(R.O. Gilbert,
Revised Total Amounts of 239,240Pu in
Surface Soil at Safety-Test Sites, in
Transuranics in Desert Ecosystems, ed. M.G.
White, P.B. Dunaway, and D.L. Wireman, U.S.
Department of Energy, Nevada Operations
Office, NVO-181 (1977), 423-429)

A 1991 study found that a
safety test site in Area 8 has measurements
of 100,000 pCi/g.

In 1979, an Atomic Energy
Commission study indicated that plutonium-239
levels in soils in Utah were as much as 3.8
times higher than average concentrations
elsewhere and was attributed to the handful of
'safety tests' conducted in 1957 and 1958 of which
Coulomb-B (1957) was a part. Most of
the other safety tests distributed the Pu239
to the north, south and east.

In
recent years the DOE estimated that the
'safety tests' contaminated 2,885 acres (4.5
square miles) with
plutonium in excess of 40 pCi/g. The
total area of
contamination
of the Nevada Test Site from those safety tests
stated in 1970 by the Atomic Energy Commission
was 250 square miles.
What are the contamination readings for the
other 245.5 square miles?

This
2005 DOE map
shows a 'potential emission source' of
Plutonium and Americium that exists (in Area
16) less than 1 mile from the Divine Strake
GZ.

A
2004 NTS report (DOE
NV 1178 1065), on page 7, shows that
surface soils in Area 16 contain 3.7 Curies
of Plutonium 239/240 (widely dispersed
across the Area). The 3.7 Curies value
is (suspiciously) one of the lowest given at
the NTS. Areas surrounding [Area] 16 (Area 18, Area 17, Area 30) have
higher values. This doesn't make sense
since those Areas are further away than Area
16 from
Yucca Flat where most atmospheric tests took
place.

Conclusion:
Area 16 must be contaminated with
Pu239 many times - possibly hundreds or
thousands of times - higher than background
levels and far higher than what is indicated by
the DOE's data ( (DOE
NV 1178 1065). In a 2004 report,
the DOE indicated that Area 16 is contaminated
with only 44.63 grams (or 2.8 Curies) of Pu239.

Learn more
with this interactive map
of the ground-zeros and fallout patterns of
those six 1950s nuclear tests

2.
Divine Strake is
planned for detonation at the U16b Tunnel
Complex (in Area 16) above an existing
reinforced limestone tunnel. The Divine Strake
GZ (ground-zero) is 1.1 miles from a tunnel
complex (U16a complex) where six underground nuclear tests were conducted from 1962 to
1971. Two of those six tests, named Marshmallow,
Gum Drop, Double Play, Ming Vase, Diamond
Dust and Diamond Mine, leaked
radiation. The
Department of Energy reported that the 'Marshmallow' test
leaked radioactivity for several days after
the detonation, which contaminated
nearby surface soils. 'Double Play' released a cloud
of radio-iodine isotopes that traveled for 200
miles towards the northeast, over the Divine
Strake ground-zero and well beyond the
Nevada Test Site boundaries.

Map of the
six underground tests conducted within
1.1 miles of the Divine Strake GZ

Re-suspension
from natural forces over the past several
decades at the Nevada Test Site could have
carried radioactive particles from
U16a complex (or other areas) to the Divine
Strake ground zero.

In
1998, a Department of Energy research team
found that plutonium had travelled almost
one mile from the site of a 1968 underground
nuclear test on water molecules called
colloids (microscopic specks of clay
suspended in ground water). [Remember:
the Divine
Strake GZ lies only 1.1 miles from
an area that the government has publicly
admitted contains radioactive surface
contamination. If radiation can travel
on colloids about 1 mile in 30 years, then
the radiation leaked from tests conducted
over 35 years ago at U16a could have already
reached the Divine Strake GZ.] Wind
and fire, similarly, could have resulted in
re-suspension contamination at the Divine
Strake ground-zero. More.

The
dust cloud: Death with Wings

The Divine Strake
explosion is expected to create a dust cloud
- containing a substantial amount of
soil matter from the ground-zero - that will
reach 10,000 feet. Entrained in
this dust cloud will be radioactive
particles that were deposited from the
fallout of several nuclear tests at the
Nevada Test Site.
The radioactive matter from prior atomic
testing still poses a grave danger
to peoples downwind since several common radioisotopes found in
fallout won't decay to safe levels for
thousands of years.

Drawing
on knowledge that airborne dust
can travel great distances, many
environmentalists fear that these
particles could get picked up by the jet
stream and reach the
East Coast. Wind-swept dust
has reached Florida from North Africa and
pollutants from coal-fired plants in China have
reached the U.S. Therefore, a
radioactive dust cloud formed above Nevada's
desert could reach any
corner of the North American continent, or
beyond.

...And
that doesn't include hydrocarbon toxins

The
following chemical byproducts of the ammonium
nitrate-fuel oil blast (equivalent to a
600-ton TNT explosive force) will also be
present in the 10,000 foot high dust cloud:

More
than 2 tons cyanide

1,535
pounds phosgene (carcinogen; pulmonary
agent; used as a
chemical weapon in World War I)

Did you know
that... U.S. nuclear testing began in the 1940s
and ceased as recently as the 1990s. The U.S. continues to conduct sub-critical
nuclear tests at the Nevada Test
Site.

The
fallout from above-ground (1951-1961) and leaky
underground tests (1961-1992) conducted at the
Nevada Test Site deposited radioactivity over most of the Northern Hemisphere.
That fallout won't decay to safe levels for thousands of
years and still remains
in aerosol form in our atmosphere. The fallout in our environment is continually entering
our food and water supplies and has been linked to cancer, genetic defects and
a myriad of neurological/immune diseases.

The
censorship of these elementary facts and the health consequences of fallout
are part of a tremendous cover-up by worldwide
governments who don't want you to know about
what may be killing you or your loved
ones. The
worldwide death toll attributable to the fallout from nuclear production and testing by all Cold War powers, including the
United States, by one expert's estimate, could be in the hundreds of millions. Read more.

A
QUOTE TO PONDER:

"...the
American people have difficulty today in
trusting the statements of nuclear
officials on radiation hazards. In the
aftermath of the Three Mile Island
episode, for example, people are
reluctant to accept at face value the
reassuring statements about the
disappearance of the danger. One wonders
whether those statements are more a
reflection of public relations strategy
than of the need to provide a
scientifically accurate assessment of
the present situation. One fact emerges
from the revelations of deceit by
government officials about nuclear
fallout: No law now protects the
American people against lying by their
government....no penalties now apply to
lying on matters that can cause death or
serious harm to human beings. The time
has come to draw the line against
coverups - especially where the health
and safety of the American people are
concerned." -
Norman Cousins - Daily Herald
(Chicago) May 7, 1979

Deseret
News -
for
their article by Lee Benson, "Radiation
facts get thumbs up" (Feb. 9, 2007),
which implied that Utahns worried about
Divine Strake are being irrational, and that
their fears are unfounded and
exaggerated. Truly disappointing.
And truly insensitive to the thousands of
Utahns who are sick or have died from
radiation-related illnesses.

Senator
Orrin Hatch (R-UT) -
for NOT STOPPING THIS TEST. Hatch once
referred to himself as 'The Great Stopper,' offering
that if he had any real concerns about the
test, he would surely put a stop to it.
Currently, Hatch wants DTRA to 'move the
test.' Again? He tried that
before. And failed. The test came
back to Nevada. Hatch: you're a great
'flopper.'

Dept.
of Energy - for the obvious reasons...
and also wasting time surfing the
internet when you should be reading the 10,000
comments on your Environmental Assessment!!

Who is Terry Wood? He is a national
sensation in the fight to stop
Divine Strake. View this STUNNING
VIDEO about what he did and read
how the world
is reacting

Listen
to an excerpt from a radio commentary about
Divine Strake (recorded for Pacifica
Radio) by Blase Bonpane, Ph.D., on April 9, 2006

Divine
Strake:

a
misleading affair

A
misleading environmental analysis

The
only way to determine if the soils at the Divine
Strake GZ (ground-zero) are safe is to
test the soil - as part of an Environmental
Impact Statement (EIS). Regrettably, the
Pentagon agency that is sponsoring Divine
Strake has opted not to complete an EIS, saying that it doesn't want
to wait the many years that the (EIS) study would take to
complete. Instead, the Pentagon released
in December 2006 a draft of a revised
environmental assessment (REA), which is
its third environmental assessment about Divine Strake since April
2006. Like the first assessment, released in April, and the second, a
revision released in May 2006 that was the basis for a FONSI that was quickly withdrawn,
the most recent draft environmental assessment fails to address real concerns
about the safety of the test. Reno attorney Bob Hager, who filed a lawsuit
to stop the test, told the Salt Lake Tribune in early February "This
is the third time they have falsely assured us there is nothing to be concerned
about."

The
revised
environmental assessment is based on data (some of it dated) from
air monitoring, aerial surveys, and ground-level radiological
surveys, as well as an analysis
of 26
soil samples.

Those 26 samples were
taken at depths of five to six inches deep of soils that were exposed to
atmospheric fallout and will likely be disturbed by the blast. The area of
sampling was a roughly circular area measuring 2,000 feet in diameter (with the
GZ at center). The area exceeds
a staggering 3 million square feet (Minnesota's "Mall of America" has
a gross area of
4.2 million square feet). The sampling
lacks in rigor because only 26 samples were taken in this vast area
that will be disturbed by the Divine Strake blast and shock wave. The soil
sampling was the equivalent of
taking one soil test per football field and could easily have missed 'hot spots'
of high concentrations of plutonium, americium and other deadly radionuclides.
The sampling also does
not explore what is below
(more than 6") the ground of the site where the
Divine Strake blast will occur. This is of
concern because the 700 tons of ammonium-nitrate fuel-oil used for 'Divine
Strake' will be detonated in a 36-foot deep hole and the blast - equivalent to a 0.6
kiloton TNT explosion - will forcefully
eject all of the dirt around the pit.

Again, more extensive soil
testing would be part of an EIS, which has
been ruled out by the Pentagon (at this point).

The
data provided in the REA is a poor substitute for rigorous sampling
(surface and subsurface) and analyzing for
radioisotopes in the soil at the
ground-zero. Moreover, the REA doesn't allude to, nor attempt to
historically reconstruct, the fallout from
the six atmospheric tests, Smoky, Turk, Shasta,
Kepler, Galileo and
Coulomb B, that most likely
contaminated the ground-zero soils.
Finally, the REA references documents that are unavailable
on the website of the agency that is
responsible for disseminating the environmental
assessment (NNSA/NSO).

It
is our view that the completion of an
Environmental Impact Statement would
actually be a
waste of taxpayer monies for the singular
reason that ample evidence (see our
comments) that should have been
included in the REA (but was omitted for
whatever reason) would be
enough to convince any legislator or
scientist that conducting Divine Strake at
the U16b complex would pose a significant danger to
public health.

Misleading
public 'hearings'

The
Pentagon broke their promise to citizens in
Utah and Nevada that it would hold public
hearings about Divine Strake. The
Pentagon instead held trade show style
meetings in mid-January in Nevada and Utah
that prohibited any type of public discourse
and forced people to stand in lines (15-20
persons deep) to ask questions of one
federal official only to be told to stand in
another line to ask a different official who
referred them back to the original
official. The night before the Salt
Lake City public information session,
federal agencies suddenly announced that the
venue had been changed, creating much
confusion. [THIS SECTION OF THIS PAGE IS BEING RESTORED in 2018]
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